November 28, 2018

Harvard Business School Brand In Play - As Are Brands of McKinsey, Sheryl Sandberg, and Roman Catholic Church

We in executive communications - that is, ghostwriters/script writers for corporations - have profited greatly from the leadership meme.

That extends right up to the present time as we research and produce executive-bylined content for "thought-leadership" books, articles, blog posts, opinion-editorials, and keynote speeches. Even permutations of the theme, such as the art of followership, bring in brisk business.

The good news is that the question - what is leadership - is being re-visited.

That's because the unofficial headquarters for leadership training Harvard Business School (HBS) is under attack.

The main reason why is that smart, alert watchdogs such as Duff McDonald have noticed that the HBS brand of leadership does not seem to have embedded a moral compass.

Therefore, also being questioned are other institutions and individuals which or who also seem to be absent a moral compass. They include management consulting firm McKinsey, chief operating officer at Facebook Sheryl Sandberg, and one of the most powerful and long-lasting brands the Roman Catholic Church.

In his article in Vanity Fair, McDonald documents how HBS built its leadership training niche and seemingly propped it up with free passes for not factoring in the morality of commercial decisions. Leaders might have felt enabled to bypass the normal rules of ethics.

When a student at HBS, Jeff Skilling, the fraud who brought down Enron, noted that if he had been employee at a corporation producing a deadly product he would not intervene. He saw his first responsibility to the need to made a profit and reward shareholders for their investment.

Because McKinsey "serves" clients without assessing the clients' values or the implications of the advice they provide clients, its approach is being vilified. Here is The New York Times' seminal article on McKinsey in South Africa. More recently, it is being censured for its alleged aid to Saudi Arabia in silencing critics. Here is one article on that. McKinsey hires many HBS alumni. Skilling had been among them.

Sandberg is also a HBS alumna as well as a graduate of Harvard College. These days her brand is in tatters.

The Wall Street Journal notes that her current mission should be to restore her own reputation, not only Facebook's. One wonders if she will ever land another leadership position in tech. The more crude version of that would be predicting she'll never eat lunch in Silicon Valley again.

And, Brand Roman Catholic Church, led for centuries by legalistic brain trusts, is being sued for allegedly protecting its reputation at the expense of the victims of clergy abuse. Among the legal strategies being used by plaintiff firms are leveraging racketeering laws and public nuisance law. Here is some of the coverage.

No surprise, a number of prominent organizations have contracted with me to discuss how they might position and package their own commentary on leadership. My recommendation: Ask yourself how you can be a game-changer in the overall decline of what once was a fundamental value in America: character.

In my generation's personal essay for college, the directions explicitly mandated an example of how we exhibited character, despite any risks involved.

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